Today honors motherhood with gifts, flowers and cards bestowed on mothers.
In America, Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became a U.S. holiday in 1914, according to History.com. It is celebrated on the second Sunday in May.
Ms. Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar.
This celebration traces back to the ancient Greeks and Romans who had festivals in honor of the mother goddess Rhea and Cybele. The clearest modern precedent for Mother’s Day was an early Christian festival – “Mothering Sunday.”
The History website says once a major tradition in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, this celebration fell on the fourth Sunday in Lent and was originally seen as a time when the faithful would return to their “mother church”—the main church in the vicinity of their home—for a special service.
Over time the Mothering Sunday tradition shifted into a more secular holiday, and children would present their mothers with flowers and other tokens of appreciation. This custom eventually faded in popularity before merging with the American Mother’s Day in the 1930s and 1940s.
